Ethical Modernity and the Case of The Heart of the Matter

Greene's postwar pessimism, cosmopolitanism, and the narrative strategies of strategic avoidance, I believe, work as coping mechanisms against the horrors of the 1930s and '40s. [...]the novel is not exclusively a "Catholic" novel, as many previous critics claim (Boyd, Orwell, Wood). [...]he did not find the plot or climax believable. Contemporary critics and journalists later noticed Greene's explicit anti-war and humanitarian sympathies, though through other novels such as The Quiet American (1955). [...]twenty-first century critics such as Lisa Fluet and Patrick Deer reference the prevalence of the Blitz in Greene's earlier entertainment, The Ministry of Fear (1943), which is not surprising considering the extensive documentation of Greene's experience in the London bombings.1 Yet, the lack of scholarship connecting The Heart of the Matter with Greene's separate classification as a political author is extensive. [...]traits of the early modernist movement include existential rather than utopic narratives, and a growing distrust and disgust of the enlightenment.3 In comparison, the culture surrounding World War II birthed the most important contributions to existential philosophy in the writings of Camus, De Beauvoir, and Sartre, and saw the critical anger with post-atrocity complacency culminate in Horkeimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. [...]it would be productive to explore works coming out of the same history and tradition as their modernist ancestors with a similar critical lens.